Evening of the Good Samaritan (7 page)

Nor, after all, did Winthrop spend so much time in the office. He was a useful public servant in any administration. He had served under three mayors, and under the auspices of both political parties. He was a persuasive speaker, a good arbiter, and there were few better expediters in the city. He had been drafted into the civic service by a “reform” mayor who had a very simple measure for integrity in public officers: it seemed to him indisputable logic that a rich man was incorruptible.
Per se.
Traders City was, in fact, very proud of its simplicity and of its size: the population was almost three million.

Alexander Winthrop would have preferred the law to medicine, and he often pointed that out as though certain shortcomings might be justified by the admission. Not that he ever explained his mistakes: he did not even admit them: but that too was as much a characteristic of the city as of the man. Until the Depression there had always been so much of everything—building, new industry, transportation; the key word was always “progress”—mistakes were construed as lessons. Any school child could tell you, for example, that Traders City could not have a subway system, the sand beneath the city being virtually “quick” when it came to driving the supporting piles. Any school child could tell you because very few of their fathers questioned the canard despite the fact that almost every administration floated a new subway bond to make sure their predecessors had not hoodwinked the people.

Dr. Winthrop’s fortune came primarily from patent medicines. Over the years his father—whose picture was on every bottle of “Winthrop’s Remedy”—had had a great deal to do with The Law, and curiously, the more respectable he himself had become at its hands, the more disreputable he had thought The Law itself. He had been absolutely immovable on his son’s profession: he made inheritance contingent upon his finishing medical school. It was one of Winthrop’s sardonic jokes on himself that having managed that, he ought to be able to do almost anything. He belonged to that first generation of Traders City men born into money. Other family fortunes were largely in farm machinery, meat packing, steel, grain and lumber. He was welcome in any club in the city, and was easily within reach of an invitation to any celebration he wanted to attend. Nonetheless, he never did escape the feeling that his money was not quite respectable. And he knew very well this was an opinion shared by Traders City society. He would have said he did not have time to think of such nonsense. But because he thought about it at all he did not have time to think very much about it. He made certain from the very beginning of his career that he became as nearly inexpendable in his own right as any man ever is: he was a trustee of the Art Museum as well as of the University; he wrote the newspaper column himself—although it was largely researched by his staff; he was on the council of every important charity, on the board of several industries and a director in the County Medical Association. And he was Health Commissioner of Traders City: he could close any hospital, any nursing home, any restaurant, any hotel. He could even condemn real estate. He had a very great deal of power.

All these things were in the mind of Mike Shea, County Democratic chairman, when he began to think of tempting Winthrop with high elective office. An accumulation of powers was not the same thing, Mike reasoned, as a concentration of it. And the vanity of some men took ascendancy after a surfeit of power. He had the feeling that Winthrop was getting near surfeit.

Mike himself had never held an elective office higher than alderman, but at formal dinners he sat next to the mayor’s wife, provided, of course, the mayor was his man. In thirty years Mike had put quite a number of his men into City Hall. The present mayor was in office, however, by an act of God, his predecessor having died at his desk. Now he proposed to run on his own. Mike had no objection; the mayor was a pious man, noted for his good works, and Mike was very much in favor of good works, public or private.

Indeed, it was a matter of public works that set Mike Shea to thinking of Alexander Winthrop. Mike had got a severe shock when the governor of the state refused to approve a proposal to build an airport in Traders City, largely out of federal funds, and over the appeal of the mayor. Mike was shocked and then furious. A conservative Democrat, he could not begin to understand the New Deal. Emergency spending would never bother him—in fact, he had thought Traders City would profit by some of it with the airport, but measures like Social Security and Workmen’s Compensation, for example, filled him with suspicion. He did not begrudge the poor people its meager aid, God knows, but something that permanent, it seemed to him, drained the party of its political treasure, and mortgaged its future for the day’s abundance. He prophesied that a decade hence the working man would be voting the Republican ticket because the Democrats had no more issues. And now, if the governor had his way—and him a Democrat, albeit a New Deal variety—Traders City was not even going to get a share of the day’s abundance!

The restaurant at which Mike Shea proposed he and Winthrop meet was itself suggestive of conspiracy. Ordinarily, Mike did his entertaining at the Athletic Club although he was about as athletic as a cart horse. Nor could he resist having the tables turned on him when Winthrop would propose that they go instead to the Union League Club. Whatever his public opinion of “bankers, manufacturers and trusters,” Mike dearly loved entrance to their secluded chambers. But this time he was adamant: Patsy’s Steak House on Dearborn. When Winthrop got there, Mike was already settled in one of the private dining rooms.

“I haven’t been in this place since Prohibition,” Winthrop said, taking the hand Mike offered across the table. Mike had an interesting handshake: he gave an intimation of a clasp, and then quickly, before a man got hold of it, he collapsed his hand; it was all much in the way of a boxer’s feinting and then riding with a punch.

“It’s a quiet spot,” said Mike, “and you know, the older I get the more willing I am to stay out of the main stream.” Mike had always stayed out of the main stream; but invariably he was to be found under the bridge.

“If you’ve some good lager beer,” Winthrop said to the waiter.

“The very thing I had in mind,” said Mike. “There’s nothing goes with steak like a glass of good beer. Are you sure you wouldn’t like a little neat whisky first, Alex?”

They talked of a number of things having no great importance, Winthrop aware of Mike’s gentle probing. Mike often spoke of “the whole man.” “You’ve got to take the whole man into consideration,” he would say, and it amused Winthrop to watch the old kingmaker scratching together bits of information about himself. They talked of baseball, the Traders City teams having gone south for spring practice. “I go down myself every year,” said Mike, “except elections.” He sighed and immediately veered away from the subject of politics so that Winthrop doubted that was what he had in mind. “I’ve a locker in the Lions’ clubhouse, you know, and they’ve given me a cap that sits down on my ears like the old Jew’s derby.”

Winthrop laughed.

Mike took a long pull at his beer. “My God, the Germans know how to make beer, don’t they?” He brushed the foam from his lips with the back of his hand and then wiped his hand with the napkin.

“A queer business, that, at Midwestern University, wasn’t it?”

Winthrop noted with some gratification the past tense. “Ah, it’s the same thing all over the country these days, Mike.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that, Alex. I don’t like to see us standing out from the crowd for something like that. Mind, a little rebellion’s a useful thing, as somebody said. But enough’s enough. You wouldn’t say that Hogan fellow’s a Communist, eh?”

“I don’t think so.”

“But he’s damn useful to them sometimes, wouldn’t you say?”

Winthrop said, “So is the American Legion, Mike.”

Mike looked startled for a moment, so startled, in fact, that Winthrop got his first intimation that Mike had been thinking of proposing him for elective office. “Well, I suppose there are times when the Lord God Almighty gives the devil a hand, if it comes to that,” Mike said slowly.

“That’s just what I meant: it takes two to make a fight. Those kids didn’t want a riot, but when the Legionnaires marched in to lay down the law to them …” He shrugged.

Mike sent his tongue on a quick tour of the dry, craggy lips. “It’s a fine organization all the same, Alex.”

“Sure it is. I’m a member myself.”

The flesh crinkled up around the pale blue eyes. “I’m glad to hear you say that, Alex. Shall we have another bottle of beer and tell them to put on the steaks?”

Winthrop was, thereafter, careful not to overstate his views. He had nothing radical to say, and his remark about the Legion had been made as much to shake Mike up just for fun’s sake as to affirm conviction. It was a dangerous bit of play to indulge in with a politician, and when the steak was finished and the apple pie before them, and Mike had not yet come to any issue worth the luncheon check, Winthrop wondered if he had not pulled a boner. But instead of becoming conciliatory, he allowed his impatience to mount and to turn, not on himself, but on Mike: what was so important about a machine boss that he could command a public servant’s appearance for two hours of babble in the middle of the day?

“I hear we’re not getting the airport,” he said when a moment lay open in the conversation, and he said it by way of dusting Mike’s wounds with salt, for he knew that the Democrats were counting heavily on Public Works to ingratiate the incumbent mayor with the voters.

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” said Mike. “It’s all a matter of negotiation among the right people. The criminal thing is—the time it wastes.”

Winthrop was amused at Mike’s calling negotiation a waste of time, but Mike himself was in deep earnest. He went on while he unwrapped the tinsel from a cigar, “I tell you, the willful practice of politics, unless you’re a politician, is a terrible waste. It’s no good having to spend all your time if you’re mayor, say, making up to people for having rubbed them the wrong way. For me, it’s different. I’m a politician. I’ve been carrying coals to Newcastle all my life, just to make sure the fires never go out.”

Winthrop took a box of safety matches from his pocket and handed them to Mike across the table.

“Now take yourself, for example,” Mike said, having lit his cigar, and his hard blue eyes penetrated the smoke he sent up between them, “you’re a natural politician. You know when to palaver a man, and you know when to strike a match on his behind.”

“I suppose I’ve never had to be on the beggary end of things, Mike. It makes a difference. If there’s not been one way to something, I’ve always found another.”

“Aye, but the point is,” said Mike, “you’re a natural. When you go into a room, it’s not long before a man knows whether he can do business with you or he can’t.”

It was as good a moment as any. Winthrop folded his arms, an amused, patient smile stretching the corners of his mouth. “What have you got in mind, Mike?”

“Oh, this and that,” said Mike with a limp gesture of his hand. He took his cigar from his lips and examined it. He looked up at Winthrop suddenly. “Do you think the governor was altogether wrong, Alex, when he put his foot down on the airport?”

“No,” he said without hesitation, but the God’s truth was that until that instant he had not given the matter any critical thought whatsoever. “After all,” he proceeded carefully, “he’s not running for reelection this year himself, and the man running for mayor is an absolutely unknown quantity—politically speaking.”

“But I’m supporting him,” Mike said in a tone more mischievous than aggrieved.

“I was looking at it from the governor’s point of view.”

Mike sat chuckling for a moment. The governor had been elected two years before on a Democratic landslide the basis of which was the early New Deal popularity. Mike had had nothing to do except pass the cigars the day after election. “Tell me the truth, Alex—if you were running for mayor yourself, would you want my endorsement?”

Winthrop shot out his lower lip, as much to discipline the lip itself as to hedge for time. “I’ll put it this way, Mike: a man can disown his son without offending nature, but neither you nor I would give two cents for the kid who spits in his old man’s eye. Would we?”

Mike’s shoulders shook although not a sound of amusement came from him. “That reminds me of the Irishman getting off the boat.” And the old man told a story the merits of which Joe Miller himself would have likely doubted. But Winthrop was caught. He settled his eyes on Mike’s and put a grin on his mouth, but all the while his mind was searching the possibilities. To what extent Mike was committed to the incumbent mayor he did not know, but Mike himself was certainly in the saddle for the time being; his only trouble occurred when a mayor of the city got so strong a vote he could virtually take over the party from Mike, and this fellow in office had never been tried. It was a bad omen for him, surely, that the governor had cold-shouldered him so soon. In a way, of course, it might be Mike Shea and the city machine the governor was “nixing.” Oh, and did not Mike know that, the wily old fox!

In almost the same voice he settled the Irishman in America, Mike asked, “Alex, what would you say to having a run yourself in the primary against the mayor?”

For once he was silent, looking from Mike to the spoon he picked up and turned round in his fingers and then to Mike again.

“It’s the greatest sport of them all,” Mike said, temptation in his voice. “It’s something every man in public service has the right to experience—the voice of the people crying out their approval.”

Something in Mike’s fervor and choice of words had the opposite effect on Winthrop to that intended: there was something disturbing as well as exciting in the voice of the people; they could shout a man down as soon as up; they went through his life, turning it over page by page, and even the illiterate of them could read between its lines. Winthrop shook his head, and at the moment meant it.

“I wouldn’t embarrass you with my endorsement,” Mike said. “After all, I’m expected to see which way the frog jumps before placing my money.”